The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (26 page)

The remembered off-field moment for Ruth came in Philadelphia. Actually it started in Delaware. The Du Ponts had invited Herb Pennock to a high-society lawn party and asked him to bring some ballplayers with him, especially that Babe Ruth character. The Yankees had an off-day in Philadelphia, and Pennock received permission and Ruth agreed to go.

It was a pleasant affair, Ruth demonstrating how to hit with a stalk of celery, very nice, until the drinks began to add up and he spotted a waitress he greatly admired. As his admiration grew and his overtures grew louder, the whisper began that “we’ve got to get him outta here.” He didn’t want to go.

A Philadelphia fight promoter came to the rescue. He convinced Ruth that there was a much better party with many more women at an establishment he knew on Broad Street back in town. Ruth argued to stay, but finally he and a number of Yankees went with the promoter. They arrived at the establishment at 1:00
A
.
M
.

At 5:00
A
.
M
., the other Yankees decided it was time to head back to the hotel for at least a little sleep before meeting the A’s that afternoon. They found the Sultan of Swat in a big chair, a girl sitting on each knee. The girls were pouring champagne on his head and giving him a shampoo. Everybody was singing.

“Anybody who doesn’t like this life is crazy,” Ruth said.

That afternoon Fred Merkle of the A’s asked him before the game how he felt. Ruth said he felt fine. Merkle said, “You don’t look fine.” Ruth hit two home runs in a Yankees win. He felt fine.

The public reformation started by the Jimmy Walker speech of 1922 obviously was long gone, but who noticed? The great man had discovered the virtues of bicarbonate of soda—“Give me a bi, kid,” he shouted to the clubhouse attendant a couple of times each day—and chewed the stuff, drank the stuff, coated his stomach, and kept moving. Third baseman Jumpin’ Joe Dugan, picked up in another deal with the Frazee Red Sox House of Discount during the 1923 season, was another good late-night runner. Whitey Witt was a runner. The Yankees were filled with runners.

They called him “Bam,” or “the Big Fellow,” or “Jidge,” a contraction of George. They never called him “Babe.” That was the outside world’s name for him. This was the inside. This was the core of the fun.

“Ruth was invited to a lot of elegant places because people were curious about him,” Waite Hoyt said. “The Vanderbilts invited him once to some big brouhaha at their big stone mansion, which at the time was 57th Street—56th or 57th—and Fifth Avenue. It was huge, surrounded by an iron picket fence, and it had a fountain and a pool out in back. So Ruth, when he went out like that the night before, would like to tell where he had been.”

“God, what a party,” he reported after this one. “There were guys with green vests and plaid vests and tails on their coats, and they were serving champagne all over the place, and then I got a little high, and then everybody’s diving in the pool and the fountain out back.”

“Where was this?” Hoyt asked.

“Well, there was a dame named Mrs. Vanderbilt was the hostess and Mr. Vanderbilt was the hoster,” the Babe said.

The one bump in all this fun was the second-place finish. Hoyt too remembered it as a season squandered. The Yankees always presumed they were going to win. They finished up on the road with a 23-game swing through the West, and Miller Huggins told them they were going to have to just about sweep the trip to beat Washington. They won 20 of the 23 games. The Senators did well enough to hold on and win the pennant by two games.

“The last game was in Philadelphia,” Hoyt said. “Have you ever been to the North Philadelphia station? It’s an elevated station, and after the game we’re waiting by the tracks. Some of us are going to New York, and others are going other places now that the season was ended. It’s October, of course, and the darkness had descended. I can never forget, standing on that platform, looking over the darkened city. Some of the lights had come on, and it was a real desultory part of the city, and now it was raining, and I remember being despondent, crestfallen, still thinking we had the best team except we were too cocky and too overconfident, believed that we could win when we wanted to. And didn’t.”

The end of the season brought the most ambitious barnstorming tour yet for the Babe. The hand of Christy Walsh was in this one, a coast-to-coast extravaganza. Ruth “covered” the World Series, a surprising Senators win over the Giants, for the Walsh syndicate, then took off with Bob Meusel into the hinterlands. Helen was back in Sudbury, sometimes visiting family in Boston. Walsh, at the end of the tour, sent a capsule summary to columnist Ed Hughes of the
New York Telegram and Mail
with a one-paragraph cover letter:

I enclose the box score of the Bambino’s trip to the coast and return. The waiting public already has been advised by the press of New York that Mr. Ruth has returned, but there are quite a number of serious disclosures in the attached summary. Please do not think I’d be so vulgar as to desire any publicity for Mr. Ruth.

Babe Ruth dropped into New York last Friday en route to his agricultural holdings at Sudbury, Mass. where broken fences, neglected cattle, plumbing and other rural items have suffered during his absence on the Pacific Coast.

Interesting notes in connection with Mr. Ruth’s sojourn are as follows—

He left New York October 11, the day after the World Series, accompanied by Bob Meusel and Christy Walsh.

Returned to New York December 6, accompanied by Walsh.
Meusel remained in Los Angeles.

The Babe covered 8,500 miles on the road trip.

He played in 15 cities in six states.

He got 17 home runs in 15 games.

He drew 125,000 people. The games were under auspices of a leading newspaper in each city, with the backing of one of the following organizations—Elks, Knights of Columbus or American Legion.

He made 22 speeches at breakfasts, luncheons, dinners and banquets given in his honor. Seven speeches were given from Pullman platforms.

He rode 250 miles on a locomotive through Montana.

He autographed nearly 5,000 baseballs. He autographed 1,800 baseballs for the San Francisco Examiner alone—all of which were sold for charity.

He headed four parades, accompanied by Mayors and city officials. He wore his dinner coat 19 times and complained of so few opportunities. Two years ago he considered dinner coats things to be avoided. He wore a silk hat once. (Under protest.) Someone told him he looked good in it, so then he bought it.

He refereed a four-round bout in Hollywood, Calif. And was presented with a wrist watch by the American Legion. He appreciates the watch, but fears other players will make unkind remarks.

He batted 1,000 autographed baseballs to 10,000 Los Angeles schoolboys and later nearly fell off the roof of the grandstand.

He beat Douglas Fairbanks in a game of “Doug.” (Similar to tennis.) Fairbanks had previously beaten [Bill] Tilden.

The railroads refused to take his money for food. The hotels gave him rooms for nothing.

He was Jack Dempsey’s guest in Los Angeles.

He drove a golf ball 353 yards, breaking the course record at Rancho Golf Club, Los Angeles.

He visited 18 hospitals and orphan asylums.

He posed for nearly 250 photos in every city. Total, 3,750.

He struck out twice with three men on base.

He failed to get a home run at Tacoma, Kansas City, Stockton, Los Angeles or San Diego.

But he got 17 home runs at Altoona, Minneapolis, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Dunsmuir [Calif.], San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Oakland and Fullerton.

He always played on the opposite team to Bob Meusel. His team won 15 games. Meusel won none.

He ate four buffalo steaks at one meal.

He talked over the radio at San Francisco for 12 minutes before he knew he was being “framed.”

He refused to wear a nightgown or pajamas at any time on the trip—despite continued protests of Walsh and Meusel. He later was presented with a big red flannel nightgown at a public luncheon at the Biltmore, Los Angeles.

He established distance records at five ballparks. He was the first lefthander to drive a ball over the left field fence at San Francisco. He was the first player that ever drove a ball over the wall at Kansas City. He drove a ball to the top of a fir tree at Dunsmuir [Calif.], a distance of 604 feet and 5 inches (measured by a surveyor).

He was made a life member of the Lions Club at Dunsmuir and started a Christmas fund which has since reached $900. (Dunsmuir is a few miles from Mount Shasta. Population less than 5,000.)

The last game was in the smallest city—Brea, near Fullerton, Calif. This is Walter Johnson’s boyhood home. Johnson pitched. Ruth also pitched—his first full nine-inning game in seven years. Ruth beat Johnson, 9 to 1. Ruth got two home runs. Johnson’s team got but four hits and no runs until the ninth inning. Other batters against Ruth’s pitching were Ken Williams, Ernie Johnson, Jimmy Austin and Meusel and Johnson. Population, 3,500; attendance 15,000.

After the final game October 31, Ruth played at a Los Angeles theater.

He is about 10 pounds overweight, but otherwise in fine condition. Stop the presses.

The return to Sudbury was short. He was at Home Plate Farm for less than two months. Or at least everybody thought he was. The one public sighting was at Madison Square Garden in the middle of January to watch Jack Delaney knock out Tiger Flowers in two rounds. The rest of the time Ruth kept a rare low profile.

The farm definitely had become more nuisance than nirvana. An adventure raising chickens had fallen apart when the chickens died. A second adventure, raising pit bulls, was disbanded when one of the dogs got out of its pen and attacked and killed a neighbor’s cow. Throw in a faltering marriage to an overwhelmed woman, a lack of inclination toward solitude, a mistress in the big city, and an ever-present buzz of Vanderbilts and Du Ponts on the horizon, and the Currier and Ives picture of a New England winter had lost its charm.

The gas tank on his latest car probably showed best where his heart was.

“We used to sell a lot of gas to the Babe,” Forrest Bradshaw, once the owner of a market and gas station in Sudbury, said years later. “The first time I waited on him he pulled his car up to the gas pump and told me to fill it up. I started to pump the gas (the hand crank in those days), and after I reached ten gallons, I asked him how much it would take. He said, ‘You keep pumping and I’ll tell you when to stop. It’s nearly empty.’ Well, I kept pumping and wondered where it all was going. I finally stopped at about 48 gallons. I looked under the car and there was no spillage, so I knew the gas was in the car somewhere.”

A friend later solved the riddle. The Babe didn’t like stopping on the ride to New York. He’d had a special 55-gallon gas tank installed. The small-town life had become the small-time life. He wanted different, bigger, better. He had acquired tastes.

“Babe would come into the market and order two slices of top-of-the-round steak cut about three inches thick,” Bradshaw also remembered. “These were for him. He would order a pound, pound and a half of hamburg for his wife and the chauffeur.”

And Helen?

“My wife thinks her hair was auburn,” Bradshaw said. “She was small, as I recall, about five-feet-six, medium build, say about 130 pounds, not beautiful, possibly attractive. Serious and brooding. I think Catholic, Democrat, frugal, a girl that seemed to be lost…. What dealings I had with her were very pleasant…. She seemed to me that she was married to someone she had to live with and had to be at his beck and call. She was much smaller than he was. She acted more like a servant or slave than a wife. I don’t know that Babe would have known how to treat a wife.”

At any rate, Sudbury and Home Plate Farm were done early this year. Done forever, as it would turn out. On February 1, the Babe was back in New York at the Yankees’ offices wearing a large overcoat and looking, well, large. The next day he was on the train again, headed to Hot Springs for his earliest visit ever.

The familiar pieces all were in place. The baths. The golf course. The chicken dinners. Then again, maybe not the chicken dinners. Mrs. Claire Hodgson, the widow showgirl, also seemed to be in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the baths. If there were searches for chicken dinners, they were only for chicken dinners. The other parts of the social calendar were occupied.

Marshall Hunt arrived two weeks after the Babe and Mrs. Hodgson arrived. If she was still around, she never was mentioned in the daily reports. The biggest news for Hunt was the strange end to the annual saga of the tubs: the Babe didn’t catch the influenza bug this time. His favorite mode of weight reduction was missing.

February 27:

Vast gloom unprettied the features of Herman Ruth today when he gave himself to serious contemplation of the distressing futility of many things and how increasingly tough it’s becoming for an honest feller to get along in this wearying world.

Herman Ruth left for the Yankees’ training camp in St. Petersburgh, Fla. and he was 20 pounds overweight. It was the first time in many years the Bambino failed to reduce himself at Hot Springs to a normal playing tonnage. But it was the first year in five he did not suffer the ravages of influenza.

The first step toward the 1925 season was a fat step. The vast gloom on the Bambino’s face was going to get much gloomier.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

N
OTHING WAS RIGHT
in 1925 from the moment the Bambino hit the Yankees’ new training site at St. Petersburg. Helen and Dorothy were there, and that was a crimp in his style. His weight wasn’t good, and that was a crimp. The outfield fences in the partially refurbished Crescent Lake Field were not part of the refurbishment. There were no outfield fences. Home runs were hard to judge, and wait a minute, Ruth went to his position in the outfield and found an alligator already was there. No fences. That was a definite crimp.

“I ain’t going out there anymore,” he reported to Miller Huggins when he came back to the dugout. “There’s an alligator out there.”

Everything was a beat off, a succession of days when nothing good seemed to happen. A report came down from New York that Ruth was being sued by a bookmaker, Edward Callahan, over a $7,700 gambling debt. The debt ran back to May 25, 1924, and Ruth supposedly had promised to pay it off when he received his paycheck. This never happened. The lawsuit story led to another story that he was broke and “growing old and fat” and that “his best days are behind him.”

Ed Barrow in New York quickly issued a statement that he could say “with authority that Ruth is far from broke,” and maybe that was right and maybe it wasn’t. Who knew? Ruth was in the middle of it all, questions like mosquitoes in the air. Maybe he was indeed broke for the moment—he often had to borrow money from teammates during spring training because he was low on cash and the paychecks for the new season didn’t start until the season started—but was that anybody’s business?

His efforts to lose weight suffered a setback when he broke a finger on his left hand making a catch and couldn’t play for five days. His stomach was grumbling and he was chewing on the bicarbonate, and it was a relief when the Yankees packed up and started their slow zigzag northward with a series of exhibitions across the South against the Brooklyn Robins. Helen and Dorothy were on one train back to New York. The Babe was on another.

Freed from restraints, he started attacking the night again in each southern town. Healed from the broken finger, he started attacking the baseball, putting on a stop-after-stop show. He had said after the first comments were made about his weight when he hit Florida that his arms and shoulders were fine and they were what he used, anyway, hitting a baseball. So now he was hitting the baseball.

Then, when the tour reached Atlanta, he became sick. The flu that he’d missed in Hot Springs had arrived and laid him low. Or something laid him low. He played a shortened game in a cold rain in Atlanta and was shivering. A doctor was called and advised him to stay in town and rest, but he put on a couple of sweaters and boarded the morning train with the rest of the team to Chattanooga, the next stop. Still feeling terrible, he skipped batting practice in the afternoon, then took off his sweaters and clocked two home runs in the game. The teams moved along to Knoxville.

Here he hit a memorable home run, his seventh of the exhibition schedule, which moved his batting average to .456. He still felt terrible, but he hit a wrong-field blast that hit a tree filled with some African American kids, watching the game for free from a distance. The ball knocked off a branch, and the kids scampered out of the tree. The home run was memorable, but the reports of it were not pleasant.

This was the segregated South, where maybe certain things could be expected. The words, however, were written for the unsegregated North, where supposedly a different situation existed. Really? This was a window to the times. Intelligent, witty men wrote bad things.

The
New York Times
account, writer unnamed, was fine:

The nice white ball left the bat as if it had been shot from a cannon mouth, cleared the left centre field wall by thirty feet and knocked a limb off a dead tree from which a dozen boys were watching the game. Luckily it was not the limb on which they were sitting, but a smaller one some ten feet above their heads.

A description by Bozeman Bulger of the
New York Evening World
, writing a few years later in a long article in the
Saturday Evening Post
on Ruth, was not fine. He called this “Ruth’s Funniest Home Run”:

Outside the park of Knoxville was a venerable oak tree…its great spreading limbs were crowded with little darkies perilously perched for a view of the hero. The picture from a distance was that of a tree full of blackbirds…even before the ball struck, darkies began dropping from the limbs…. The game was interrupted while the crowd roared with laughter…. “Boy, I’m tellin’ you,” exclaimed one of the Brooklyn players, a Southerner, “that tree fairly rained pickaninnies for the next half hour.”

Marshall Hunt, Ruth’s daily Boswell, alas, was worst of all in his next-day account in the
Daily News
:

Lines of mahogany-hued humanity perched ape-like on the branches of a huge and stark elm tree outside of Caswell Park were imperiled this afternoon by your Herman Ruth, though not, assuredly, by any homicidal intent. Mr. Ruth declares with vehemence he bosoms no animosity against mahogany-hued humanity of any shade or proportions, temperament or previous conditions of servitude.

Six senegambians, clinging to the branches of that tree almost were shaken to earth like ripe apples today when a virile, he-man, honest-to-goodness home run was made by your Herman, his third in two days. The ball cleared the left field fence by twenty feet in the fifth inning of a game with Brooklyn’s Dodgers, struck the tree resoundingly and brittle branches beat the senegambians to the ground by only a fraction of a second.

This was 1925 humor. Nobody thought anything about it. Or at least nobody said anything. The next stop was Asheville, North Carolina.

The train left Knoxville early in the morning. Ruth still felt terrible. It was a trip of 100 curving miles through the Great Smoky Mountains. Ruth settled down to play cards, hearts, with catcher Steve O’Neill, Urban Shocker, and trainer Doc Woods. Ruth felt like he was burning up. He asked Woods to take his temperature.

“You sure are running a fever,” Woods decided. “I’ll see what I can do for you when we get to the hotel.”

The twists and turns of the train now upset Ruth’s stomach. Everyone on the ride was a bit woozy. Ruth seemed to be getting incoherent. When the train reached Asheville, he tried to walk, but collapsed in the waiting room of the station. He grabbed a radiator, started to fall, but O’Neill and catcher John Levi grabbed him before he reached the ground. On the cab ride to the Battery Park Hotel, he was delirious.

“I want to go home,” he said. “I’m sick. I’m going to take an airplane and go right to New York. I don’t care if it drops.”

At the hotel, Dr. Charles Jordan, an Asheville physician, was called. He diagnosed a dual condition of influenza and indigestion. It was decided in the morning that Ruth should take the 3:50 afternoon train back to New York. He was still weak, but did eat some breakfast and asked for more, which Dr. Jordan refused to give him. The good doctor had been doing some research into Ruth’s lifestyle, talking with other Yankees, and had a cautionary message for the Sultan of Swat.

“All I can say,” the doctor said, “is that unless somebody is appointed to act as guardian over him at the dining table, he won’t be a baseball player very long.”

Marshall Hunt noted that the doctor had made this diagnosis without ever seeing the patient in Hot Springs “at 11 o’clock at night, ordering sirloin steaks smothered with pork chops and devouring them in the same elapsed time and with the thoroughness it takes Henry Ford to fetch a flivver from the mines of Minnesota and relay the product to an Indiana farmer.” The Babe was moaning again, hanging on to the shoulder of Yankees scout Paul Krichell when he walked through the hotel lobby on the way to the train.

Krichell, who would accompany Ruth back to the big city along with Bob Boyd, the one-armed sportswriter, went on a mission in the morning to buy some pajamas for the Bambino, who always boasted that he slept in the nude. Krichell was looking for size 48, but the best he could find in the town was size 42, color passionate pink. He said the plan was to slit the back on the tops and just throw away the bottoms. Better than nothing.

The news of the Babe’s collapse, of course, already had made headlines because, as with any head of state, the reports of all his ailments made headlines. (Hunt, after all, had written that entire article about the Babe’s corns.) This notoriety caused a problem when the 3:50 train out of Asheville missed a connection to the northbound train in Salisbury. When the northbound train arrived in Washington and reporters found no G. H. Ruth on board, a fast rumor started that he had died.

The rumor was spread by a Canadian news agency and picked up in England, where the London dailies, working on tight deadlines, produced front-page obituaries on the American baseball star. The
Evening News
said that “he was equally successful at batting, fielding and pitching, but his smashing hits were his specialties.” It also said he was handicapped by the fact that “he was putting on fat.”

While the English mourned a character they never had met or known, the character spent a relatively uneventful night in his lower berth on a later northbound train. He tried breakfast again in the morning, couldn’t hold it down, and was still feverish and woozy as the train approached New York. The last stretch was called the Manhattan Transfer, the place where an electric engine was added to the train to bring it through the tunnel under the Hudson River and into the city.

The Babe, helped by Krichell, went to the washroom to freshen up for his public. Once there, Ruth realized he hadn’t brought his comb, so Krichell went to find one. When the scout came back, the Babe was on the floor of the washroom, unconscious. He not only had fallen but had hit his head. Krichell, unable to rouse the slugger, notified the porter that he needed help, and the train arrived at Penn Station and a grand melodrama began.

Helen and a friend, Mrs. C. C. White, were waiting at the station…

Ed Barrow and a couple of Yankees officials were waiting…

The gathered writers and photographers from all of those New York newspapers were waiting…

Assorted fans and the ever-present New York curious were waiting…

The Babe was unconscious in his berth, where he had been carried.

Helen and Barrow, noticing that their man had not disembarked with the rest of the passengers, went onto the train, where they found him, still unconscious and in the midst of great activity. A doctor was called. A porter with a wheelchair arrived and was rejected. A stretcher and four men to carry the patient were called. Helen, “an attractive young woman in a blue coat with some vague kind of fur border and a diamond bat pin that looked as though it must weigh several ounces,” began to cry softly. The four men with the stretcher arrived and wanted to slide the Babe through a window, but the window was too small. A man was sent for a screwdriver to unscrew the frame and make the window larger.

One odd moment seemed to follow another. The ambulance called from St. Vincent’s Hospital—“where the Babe has a season’s ticket,” one writer said—broke down. Another ambulance had to be called. A train carrying the entire roster of the Boston Braves, on their way back to Boston, stopped at the next track. Pitcher Rube Marquard and manager Dave Bancroft came to the Babe’s train, seeking information. They had heard that the Babe had died, were relieved that he hadn’t, but were saddened that he was knocked out and in need of medical treatment.

The four men with the stretcher finally hoisted the great man through the expanded window. They carried him through a crowd, put him on a freight elevator. He awakened long enough to say, “Helen, I feel rotten.” He then went into convulsions. He had one, two, three convulsions. A physician gave him an injection. He had another convulsion. He had to be held down.

Helen rode in the front seat of the ambulance, still crying every now and then, looking back at her husband. He had another convulsion. The ambulance did not travel fast. The driver explained that he didn’t have a bell to warn the taxicabs that he was coming. The Babe had another convulsion, the largest, while being transferred from the ambulance to St. Vincent’s. Seven men held him down.

Two hours later, all this had passed. He was sitting up in bed, talking and laughing.

“Ruth’s condition is not serious,” Dr. Edward King, the Yankees’ team doctor, announced at last to reporters. “He is run down and has low blood pressure, and there is the indication of a slight attack of the flu. What he needs is rest. He should have been in bed a week ago.”

“The Big Bam yesterday just about beat a long throw from Death, the outfielder in Life’s game,” Damon Runyon tapped out in a hurry for the
New York American.
“He slid in safe over the home plate of rest and medical attention.”

W. O. McGeehan of the
New York Tribune
won the phrase-of-the-day contest with “The Bellyache Heard Round the World.” The Babe, after all of this, was fine.